The present invention relates generally to graphical user interfaces in telephony, and more particularly to scrolling lists with automatic compression and expansion.
In light of the rapid technological developments and globalization of the world economy, the role of telecommunication is becoming increasingly important. As such, there is a growing focus on using state of the art computer technology to provide new and improved telecommunication capabilities. The capability of combining voice and digital data transmission is enabled by the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) protocol.
One popular feature, commonly referred to as Caller ID or CLID (Calling Line Identification), displays the caller's name and telephone number on the receiver's device as shown in FIG. 1A. CLID information is stored at a public telephone network and delivered to the receiver's display device if the receiver subscribes to the Caller ID feature.
There are also telephones that can store a list containing names, multiple telephone numbers, and address information. PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), provide graphical icons associated with particular telephone numbers.
Also available today are communicators that facilitate various types of communication such as voice, faxes, SMS (Short Messaging Services) messages, and Internet-related applications. One such product offers a "contacts" feature for managing contact information including names, telephone numbers, and addresses. It also allows exchanging contact information as business cards in an SMS message.
Conventional devices, however, have two distinct modes of operation: open and closed. When closed, the product operates as a telephone and the user cannot access the display of the contacts cards. To display the contacts cards, the product must be open and in hands-free mode. When the product is open, if the phone part of the product was not previously turned on, the user must close the product and turn on the phone part of the product, then reopen the product in PDA mode to make a call.
Additionally, the product has separate, distinct applications that handle each type of communication tasks. The distributed interface of the product is highly compartmentalized by applications, thus restricting the sharing of information between applications. Specifically, the telephone application and contacts application are completely independent and must be launched separately. Because the two applications do not share information, it sometimes requires the user to input the same information in both applications. Furthermore, features of each application may only be activated within the respective application.
When a user is in a telephone application, for example, a user cannot manipulate a contacts card. Therefore, to modify or update a contacts card information, the user must launch a contacts application. Similarly, the user can initiate a call only from a telephone application and not from a contacts card. Even if a user enters a telephone number in a telephone application, this information cannot be saved in a contacts application as a new contacts card. Likewise, the product does not allow information to be shared between the telephone application and the contacts application.
To create a contacts card, the user must launch the contacts application, select "logs," choose a communication event (such as call received), then press "create card" to create a new contacts card. Even so, these series of steps only transfers the telephone number but not the associated name to a new contacts card, and any additional information must be entered within the contacts application. To initiate a call, the user must leave the contacts application by pressing the hard key for "telephone." The telephone directory displays only the names but not related fields.
Current telecommunication features also do not take full advantage of CLID information. Specifically, CLID information is used for display purposes only in providing information to the receiver about the caller. After the CLID information is displayed, it cannot be manipulated, transferred to another device or user, or used in other application programs.
Additionally, besides the name and the number of the caller, CLID does not provide additional information that further defines the type of communication device or the location of the caller. For example, the receiver may not know or remember whether the displayed number is a wireline or wireless, or a work or home telephone number. This type of information would further assist the receiver in determining the caller's device and location, thus, further defining the importance of the call.
Generally, telephone networks only transmit the caller's CLID information to the receiver. There are currently some private networks that transmit CLID information to both the caller and the receiver. As mentioned above, however, the transmitted CLID information has been limited to only the name and the number of the other party.
Moreover, directories are stored in the memory of the communication device, which generally has limited storage capacity. This restricts the device's ability to store a desired amount of information in the device. Related to this problem is the need to store information at different locations within the device. For example, speed dial data is stored separately from the main directory data. Not only does this duplicate the data entry process, data maintenance and updates need to be performed for each location to avoid unsynchronization of the data.
Searching for an entry in the directory can also be tedious. Unless the user remembers the name of the entry and conducts a text search for the desired entry, the user must scroll through each entry sequentially. In doing so, if each entry contains many related fields, scrolling through each entry while displaying other unnecessary fields reduces the efficiency of the search. Not only does this slow down the search significantly, it also makes the search more difficult. Additionally, the directory does not present additional information that further defines the type of communication device or the location of the caller in an easily recognizable manner.
Therefore, it is desirable to integrate various telecommunication applications to simplify user interfaces and facilitate efficient information sharing.
It is also desirable to manipulate the CLID information to provide enhanced user interfaces.
It is further desirable to provide additional information related to the CLID to better identify the caller's identity and location of the call.
In addition, it is further desirable to improve the search feature to scroll through the directory more easily.